Rose Water and Chagrin

I am at my first market. I am nervous, excited, worried about what kind of reputation I will begin to develop among both the marketing and the market community. Will I sell anything? Will I ever break even on my investment? Is my hope of launching a farm even realistic? Since my marketing plan this year consists entirely of selling through these Thursday and Friday, and alternate Saturday markets, it feels like a major moment when a young girl walks up to my stand that first chilly afternoon and successfully petitions her mother to buy a pansy pop. I have made my first dollar. After child and parent have wandered out of earshot (lollipop already unwrapped and—a relieved sigh here—not stuck to the wrapper) the Mathematician says, "Hey—you should frame that dollar, Mom. Don't they do that in stores with the first money they make?" Heck no, not me, I tell her. Maybe I'll draw a smiley face on George, but this one is going in the bank. Now I'm only $2,397.22 in the red for the year.
     We make almost $80 the first market. Towards the end, I spot an old friend from my nursery days at Windy Hill Farm; delighted to see a familiar face, I wave and he comes over to check out the booth with his wife, who is a private gardener in the area. She size up my selection of hand-sewn aprons and bags, my flower syrups and my bouquets. "Living the dream, huh?" she says rhetorically, and I can't miss the rind of sarcasm in her comment. They don't buy anything, but the husband wishes me good luck before they move on. There is a little shadow on my lilacs after that.
      How can this not be living the dream? Here was my morning's work a few weeks ago, when the apothecary rose I lovingly transplanted and nurtured two years ago burst into glorious bloom. When I brought it that errant runner from the Shaker medicinal garden where I worked, I did so because I loved the way it filled the surroundings with fragrance for three very special weeks in late spring, and how its vase-shaped hips graced the final days of my fall labors. I had no idea I would someday be harvesting from this plant as part of my effort to turn a farm dream into a financially viable reality. Now, here I am plucking one silken handful of petals at a time, passing by only the ones with a honeybee working the pollen-rich stamens. The Shakers were not allowed to pluck the flowers with enough stem for a bouquet: decorating the household was considered frivolous. That wasn't the stoic misfortune it might seem. Each bloom on this simple species rose only lasts 24 hours, whether on the bush or in a vase. Moreover, a day among the blossoms is better than the brief splendor of such a bouquet. The chore of picking roses is undeniably sensual: taking the most beautiful part, in its prime, in a gesture that has to be a caress if the petals are not to be torn or sift down from the fingers to fall among the thorns.

   The resulting harvest is no less sensuous: a bowl of heart-shaped silk, that whispers as you sift through it, and fills the air with that evanescent fragrance of fragrances. There are so many petals! I confess, by the third harvest, I began to be drawn away from the idea of product and profit, and began to think of the emotionally healing potential of a bath carpeted with pink petals; a hedonistic soak in the middle of the afternoon, when the heat of the sun would send the smell of the highest flowers up and in through the bathroom window which is directly above the bush. No: I think the fear of bouquet-making must have been the least of the Shaker Elders' concerns as they planned for the annual rose harvest. Perhaps they sent the more prosaic males of their celibate sect out to accomplish the task, and left the women and girls home to boil the petals and drain off the rosewater.
    After some experimentation, I have dismissed the notion of making rosewater myself. The only part with intense fragrance is the steam that collects on the lid after I have cooked the petals at a bare simmer 20 minutes and then let them cool. The brew itself is a disappointing brownish color, and while it smells faintly of roses, it tastes like vaguely rose-ish tea. Cooked with sugar and re-steeped in fresh petals, I get a delicious thin pink syrup... which proceeds to show mold on the surface after a week in storage. With more sugar, it is a beautiful rose pink, thick and sweet and, in blind taste tests among The Sisters (mine, not the Shakers)  is deemed far more rosey and delicious than the fancy commercial stuff I received for Christmas. Now, to convince the masses that rose syrup is the stuff of their summer. I have about 25 bottles, and at an affordable $6 each I could not only make a reputation for myself, I could make some headway into that problem of How the Farm Pays.
    Except, oddly, that trying to sell rose syrup is an uphill battle. It begins to feel less like Living the Life and more like another of my thankless,  hopeless endeavors that rank up there with selling the novel, improving the Shaker Museum gardens, and writing the handbook for CSA customers. Offered up mixed in seltzer, the marketgoers are curious  for two weeks. I get smiles, and I get my first customers. It is an encouraging start. Then, as summer approaches, the skeptics and grouches come to rain on my parade. I might as well be smiling, issuing my friendly hello and inquiring, "Would you like to try some of my dog shit on a cracker?"   I receive, in this order, "Uh, I don't think so." "Does it have a lot of sugar? I can't eat any sugar." "I don't like roses." And, the chilly week when I am passing out half-Dixie-cups of black tea with rose syrup, "Does that have caffeine in it?" Really? I mean, really? One week, two women make it a point to walk into my booth so they can inform me that flowers make a mess, get in the way of conversation at dinner parties, and that the taste of flowers in any form is unappetizing. O-kayyy... thanks for that. Worse, they're not even working together. They come separately, like two different slaps on the same afternoon!  It's like a trend: each week, fewer buyers and more grief. To top it off, I'm bringing almost as much back home as I brought to market, except now it's wilted.
    The Patient Spouse makes, in three hours, what I can sell in 5, on a good day, net. I get a total of ten hours a week to replicate my wages a year ago: $15,000. He knows and I know it won't happen at three lousy farm markets. I can forget about getting paid for my time. But if you look at that figure, $15,000, it doesn't look like a lot to ask for in terms of earnings for a business. And yet...
     And yet, after that eyebrow-raising first week when I came home overjoyed at the $80 in my pocket and he zipped his lips before he could let them express the "that's it?" expression writ across his handsome face, I have gone through days where I have sold, coaxed, cajoled, clipped, packaged and pleaded my heart out for $25 or $30. What am I doing wrong? I can grow beautiful lettuces, incredible parsley, and outstanding dill. I can make heartbreakingly beautiful, fragrant, unique and lasting bouquets. It all travels to market...and most of it travels back home. I can cook, sew, or arrange the most beautiful and affordable hostess gifts possible, and no one stops long enough to consider them.
      This week, I am taking serious stock of my options. I don't want First-Flower to fail before even the first flowers from seed have come into bloom. I still think learning to deal with my envy at others' success and to pour forth happiness and gratitude has got to be the answer in a large-picture way. Besides—remunerative or not, yes, I am "living the life": not the life of leisure and luxury as this cliche implies, but the life I have studied, toiled, considered and waited for all the years of my life until now: a life of tending to the soil, finding what is good in it, and offering that to others. Maybe I just need a rose bath and then everything will be coming up roses again. Bloom where you are planted.